Conjugations
Marriage and Form in New Bollywood Cinema
Bollywood movies have been long known for their colorful song-and-dance numbers and knack for combining drama, comedy, action-adventure, and music. But when India entered the global marketplace in the early 1990s, its film industry transformed radically. Production and distribution of films became regulated, advertising and marketing created a largely middle-class audience, and films began to fit into genres like science fiction and horror. In this bold study of what she names New Bollywood, Sangita Gopal contends that the key to understanding these changes is to analyze films’ evolving treatment of romantic relationships.
“Informed by Gopal’s incredible warehouse of knowledge about popular Indian cinemas, Conjugations illuminates diverse dimensions of conjugality and Bollywood through multiple lines of inquiry, including attention to song-and-dance sequences, the emergence of the new genre of horror, and the revitalization of Bengali cinema. This dazzling and wide-reaching book will be of interest to scholars not only in cinema studies, but more generally, those interested in postcoloniality, feminism and gender, and the nation-state in South Asia.”
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Conjugating New Bollywood
2 Family Matters: Affect, Authority, and the Codification of Hindi Cinema
3 Fearful Habitations: Upward Mobility and the Horror Genre
4 Conjugal Assembly: Mulitplex, Multiplot, and the Reconfigured Social Film
5 Bollywood Local: Conjugal Rearrangement in Regional Cinema
Conclusion: New Bollywood and Its Others
Notes
Index
Asian Studies: South Asia
You may purchase this title at these fine bookstores. Outside the USA, see our international sales information.
